“I find the internet-driven pressure to make pieces short, data-dense, and crisply opinionated — as opposed to thoughtful, multi-perspectival, and lyrical — rather oppressive, leading to a certain kind of superficial smugness as well as general submission to the forces of reference over reflection.” — Erik Davis[1]

There’s been a noticeable spike in the national debate about marijuana legalization, after CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta surprised everyone by announcing that marijuana is not only harmless but helpful. It’s the first time I can ever recall cheering anything said by a CNN correspondent.

Prudishness about drug use tends to be an “Old Right” thing. Just about everybody I know in the New Right has used drugs. (Except Greg Johnson, who is a bit of a narc.) Old-time right-wingers tend to associate drugs with hippies, and worry that somehow drug use leads to liberalism (or follows from it). Read more …

Most of America’s founding ideology is bunk, and America’s founding culture is pretty much rotten to the core. But beneath all that flowery Masonic nonsense about “happiness” and against “tyrants” scribbled by a bunch of wealthy merchants who didn’t want to pay taxes was the wonderful and revolutionary notion, most directly inscribed in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, namely the notion of individual sovereignty. Read more …